The telecommunications industry has advanced to the point where there is now a vast array of services and technologies available to consumers. As services become more sophisticated, and competition more widespread, there is a natural pressure to reduce costs and improve efficiencies in the administration of a telecommunication network. The traditional approach to troubleshooting problems associated with a customer losing, or believing to have lost, Internet connectivity was for the service provider to send a service technician to the subscriber premises. To verify Internet connectivity, the service technician would attempt to make their own Internet connection from the subscriber premises in order to assess whether a connectivity problem actually exists, and if so, to attempt to determine the nature of the problem. However, such use of service technicians, known in the industry as a truck roll, is wasteful and may engender sometimes unnecessary expenses.
Additionally, expenses for truck rolls are becoming more acute as service providers enter the realm of “triple play” services, i.e. offering voice, video and data services to customers. In particular, the introduction of the “triple play” services has triggered a move to the Gigabit Ethernet based networks (such as 1 Gigabit Ethernet networks, 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks and the like) that offer sufficient bandwidth to carry voice, video and data traffic to and from customer premises. Hence, more skilled technicians are needed to attend to potential trouble, driving costs even higher. The motivation to reduce truck rolls has therefore never been greater.
There is a solution for testing network connections described in a PCT patent application PCT/CA2004/001740 filed on Sep. 24, 2004 (and assigned to BCE Inc.) teaching a method and system for connection verification, which is incorporated in its entirety herein by reference. In particular, the application discloses provisioning of network testing using Layer 1 (“shoe”) and Layer 2 (switched Private Virtual Circuits) switching of a test apparatus to the appropriate line under test. Nevertheless, there is a need for an advanced solution that would allow network tests to be remotely provisioned and conducted in a Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) based network.